My friend Morgan Stewart has said it all publicly that either a few of us have thought to ourselves at one time or another or have said out-loud in a secret behind closed door email coalition session. "Why do Email feedback mechanisms ONLY focus on the negative and not ever the positive"?

I couldn't agree more with what Morgan put into his article. Why aren't the email client makers and web email providers interested in improving email to its fullest extent. Yes, Yes, Yes, I know that marketers are only <1% of abuse desk issues while they fight the real battles of spam, bots, phishing, etc, but really how hard can it be to create a button to remove a negative from the reputation score or filter count when some does something right?

I constantly hear at these secret behind closed door email coalition sessions where ISP's or filtering companies give a good ole' pat on the back to those senders who participate in email best practice discussions and ensure their customers are doing the right things, but to me that should also come in the form of something more measurable. It's odd that all I ever hear from the email client makers, web email providers, and email filtering companies is reputation rules when it comes to getting your email delivered properly and that if they see negative measurable compliant's via a spam button you'll surely will be in the dog house, but no one to date seems to support the notation of sending good email will get you back into the bigger house via a not-spam button. Why is it that ISP's, web email providers, and email filtering companies make senders plea their way out of false positive spam issues via a phone call, web forms, or a secret email list on behalf of their customers when the end-users, whom they already listen to about spam issues, should be the ones voting positively about their good experiences in email?

 

Most here know metrics are a good thing for senders to see so they can identify what the issues really are and can correct things on their own without a call or web form. I can also safely say from experience that most senders RARELY call someone/something on the receiver side these days if they have a clear overview in thanks partly to data we can see via negative feedback loops. So why not give a FULLER or more complete picture of how end-users see email? To me and what I read from Morgan here is that we are only seeing half the picture when it comes to metrics. So I agree with Morgan! How can we turn email for the better in 2010?

Good article Morgan!

 -Dennis
Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

Comments

In all of the major webmail clients, the "not spam" button is in the spam/junk folder. It's there so that users can tell ISPs when the filters made a mistake.

Just because the ISPs don't tell marketers when a user clicks "not spam" doesn't mean it has no effect.

My worry about this (though I love the concept, don't get me wrong) is gaming. Too easy to send lots of emails to "owned" email addresses and then click on the "thumbs up" button programmatically. Not that most legitimate brands would do that, but many less scrupulous players will. ISPs would have a hard time taking that data seriously for filtering.

Full credit to George for noting the worry in the first place, but I'm happy to grab it and run with it.

Agree with you Matt (George) on that point, but I recall that AOL and or HotMail have been able to control those issues with some of the known spammers trying to move things out of the spam folder or marking them up as good. They have been able to find those accounts and turn them off. I would think that with sender score those known sources of crappy email would be stopped anyways at the edge vs. legitimate brands who aren't tanked with crappy scores are the time like spammers

J.D. but the difference is that end-users don't know that. they know and are trained to hit the spam button to cause pain, but would never know to move something out of junk back to inbox causes change.

Thanks for the shout out Dennis. Great point by Matt and George about the potential for gaming. No doubt, this is a potential downfall. However, by closely monitoring the relative weights of a "thumbs up" button a solution is not difficult. The key is in the ratios of thumbs up to thumbs down and in making this visible to the public.

Take a look at www.fmylife.com (always good for a few laughs, and admittedly, a secondary source of inspiration for the article). They show numbers for both positive and negative reviews, which makes the delta a determining factor in ranking posts.

Worst case scenario, if gaming became an issue, is to set weight of the positives could be set close to 0, but still provide this information back through feedback loops. Showing positive reviews next to the sender line (as recommended in the article) may get more people to open, but when subscribers see the message is garbage, it would drive spam complaints up too.

I have a better idea: Send relevant email, with permission, in reasonable quantities, at a rate determined by the recipient. And "Don't buy lists, don't do co-registration sign-ups".

And lastly: Respect your recipients. Don't think of them as 'wallets' and every email sent but bulked as 'lost money'.

Yes it is more difficult. It is the job of the sender to do all of the above. Don't like it? Get another job.

http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2008/10/is-your-email-an-invited-guest.php

The SenderOK plug-in does this - allowing users to classify senders as VIP, Important or at least Routine (Not Spam) where this data is anonymously remembered in the cloud (anonymous in that we don't specifically record that you as an individual adjusted a specific sender to spammer status).

Anonymously learning who the good emailers are via Social Sorting Algorithms, the software becomes more and more of a boon to users and Email Senders alike over time. Users can even manually adjust how a sender should be classified (which is what your article says users should be able to do) and SenderOK will then marginally adjust that sender's priority for everyone (the key adverb being "marginally").